One of the challenges for worldwide communication networks is the integration of different types of conventional communication networks and new network architectures into one consolidated network as seen by a user. The goal is to provide users with a unified network spanning the globe. But to provide unified networks, data must be able to pass seamlessly from one network to the other networks and the same data quality must be achieved as would be in a single independent network.
To achieve these objectives, the problems of degradation of voice data quality and network delay must be avoided. Degradation of the voice data occurs as a result of the decompressing and compressing processes in the voice encoder and decoder (CODEC) devices in the switching equipment and are unavoidable when coupling two different types of networks together where compression is needed. Extra network delay is typically introduced by the jitter buffer in each network gateway node. In known manner, the gateway node and jitter buffer provide a mechanism for coupling together two dissimilar networks.
The connection of two dissimilar types of networks, for example an Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) network and an Internet Protocol (IP) network, results in the degradation of voice quality. Some voice quality degradation occurs even if the same voice CODEC design is used on both sides. The technique of Tandem Pass Through (TPT) has been applied to address the problem of voice quality degradation due to the compress/decompress operations. In addition to voice quality degradation, there is problem of accommodating the differences in data payload specifications between the dissimilar types of networks. While TPT can be effective in addressing the voice quality degradation problem, differences in the data payload specifications still give rise to intercompatibility problems.
Accordingly, there remains a need for a mechanism to handle the differences in payload specifications for interconnecting dissimilar networks.